Part 3 of 7
SALT LAKE CITY – Many negotiated provisions of teacher union collective bargaining agreements cost public schools a lot of money.
But the loss can’t always be measured by dollars alone. Some traditional contract provisions also have negative impacts on student learning.
MORE NEWS: Know These Before Moving From Cyprus To The UK
A majority of public school districts around the nation have union contracts calling for automatic, annual “step raises” for nearly every teacher, regardless of their performance or effectiveness in the classroom.
That means teachers have little or no incentive to improve their skills and become more effective instructors, because they know their salaries will increase regardless of their performance.
That has been the case in several Utah school districts for years, although a new state law is expected to bring a degree of accountability into the teacher compensation system.
Many districts around the nation also have overly generous sick and personal day policies, which tend to encourage rampant teacher absenteeism, high substitute teacher costs, and constant learning interruptions for students.
Several school districts in Utah are plagued with such policies, despite the state’s right-to-work laws that would seemingly cause public employee unions to be less powerful and less able to dictate such policies.
The most outrageous example is the Nebo school district union contract, which showers teachers with up to 120 paid sick days per year.
More money for (sometimes) nothing
MORE NEWS: How to prepare for face-to-face classes
Perhaps the most troubling examples of wasteful spending through collective bargaining are the automatic, annual “step” raises traditionally awarded to most teachers in the nine Utah districts we surveyed.
These annual raises come from salary “step” charts in union collective bargaining agreements. The charts determine how much each teacher will make each year, and have traditionally been based on seniority and the number of graduate-level college credits they’ve earned.
In other words, two third-year teachers at the same school will probably get the same raise, and make the same salary, even if one is very effective in the classroom and the other is not.
The step raises tend to be very expensive for schools.
In 2012-13, here’s what eight of the nine Utah districts surveyed paid out to cover the step raises:
Granite – $3.4 million; Salt Lake City – $900,000; Carbon – $108,000; Davis – $3.6 million; Rich – $35,320; Logan City – $571,931; Nebo – $1.2 million; Weber – $375,000; and Murray – $157,705.
Remember, the raises are annual, and so are the added costs for school districts.
What are taxpayers getting for this extra investment every year? There is no guarantee of anything, because there are no incentives for teachers to improve their performance in exchange for annual raises.
As the Deseret (Utah) News wrote in a 2011 editorial, “…The idea that all teachers should be paid equally regardless of performance is clearly not the pathway to a better education system.
“It is easy … to imagine that more talented young people might be attracted to teaching careers if they believed they would be rewarded economically for doing a great job.”
The money would be far better spent on some sort of bonus or merit pay program tied to teacher performance. That sort of system, which is being adopted by more and more schools around the nation, would require some form of measurable improvement for teachers to get a raise, so students would benefit and taxpayers would be getting something for their money.
Districts would probably also spend less on raises every year, since some teachers would not qualify for any type of raise.
Kenneth Grover, principal of the highly successful Innovations Early College High School in the Salt Lake City school district, has witnessed the positive benefits of merit pay on a limited basis in his district.
“It does work – it does motivate,” said Grover, who is also the director of secondary education in the Salt Lake City district. “If you know you are going to get rewarded for demonstrating gains, why wouldn’t you be motivated?”
Some great young teachers working under traditional union pay scales become frustrated because they are compensated the same as lesser instructors. Some leave the profession because of that, according to Grover.
“They come in with a great deal of passion, wanting to make a difference, then realize they’re up against an unmovable system,” Grover said.
There is hope on the horizon. A new Utah state law requires public schools to have a new comprehensive teacher evaluation system in place by the 2015-16 academic year, according to Linda Alder, educator effectiveness coordinator in the Utah State Office of Education.
The evaluations will be based on three criteria – observation, student growth and stakeholder input, Alder said. Teachers will be ranked in a four-tier system, and those on the two lowest tiers will not qualify for step raises until they improve.
That will address the problem of weak teachers receiving raises, but the law does not force districts to differentiate compensation among those in the two higher tiers.
The majority of teachers will probably fall in the two highest categories, but some will still be far better than others. There is a difference between doing a good job and a great one, and the great teachers should make more.
The new law does not require local school boards to establish merit pay systems, or abolish “step raise” systems. While they would be free to do so, school boards will still have the option of negotiating compensation systems with their local teacher unions, according to Alder.
“I think most districts will choose to negotiate,” Alder told EAGnews.
That means automatic, annual step raises will probably survive in some form, because the unions wouldn’t have it any other way.
At least one Utah district with a teacher union – Ogden – may be a strong candidate to ditch step raises when the new teacher evaluation system is in place.
“I believe we will be able to have a conversation about what we really mean when we say we want a good teacher,” Brad Smith, the Ogden school superintendent, told EAGnews. “When we talk about a good teacher, one hallmark is that they tend to be engaged on collaborative work with their fellow teachers every day. Right now there is no way to reward them for that.”
“Once we have these systems in place, we can make compensation reflect our priorities.”
Lots of paid days off
Sick and personal leave provisions in union contracts have also proven costly for several Utah school districts, in more ways than one.
The districts spend large sums of money on pay and benefits for absent teachers, and big dollars for substitutes. Meanwhile, many studies have illustrated that teacher absenteeism clearly affects student learning and performance.
As the Center for American Progress wrote in a report about teacher absences, “Teachers are the most important school-based determinant of students’ academic success. It’s no surprise researchers find that teacher absence lowers student achievement. Second, (education) resources are scarce, and any excess of funds tied up in teacher absence, which costs at least $4 billion annually (across the nation), should be put to better use.”
Salt Lake City attorney Blake Ostler, who has represented many schools in labor affairs, calls the generous sick leave policies “a pretty amazing thing.”
“With the amount of leave they are given, when one is terminated, they will usually have three or four months of back pay coming, due to unused paid leave,” Ostler said.
Perhaps the most outrageous paid absence policy in Utah comes from the Nebo district:
For career educators, the number of sick leave days available at the beginning of each school year is 120 working days minus the number of days used during the previous two school years. However, the compensation during the last 30 days available will only be 85 percent of regular salary.
Talk about an incentive for being sick a lot! If a Nebo teacher took no sick days, or just a few, for two years, he or she could take two-thirds of a school year off (a normal year being about 180 days) and still collect a good portion of his or her salary.
As a result of this policy, Nebo’s approximately 1,250 teachers took a combined total of 11,253 sick and personal days off in 2012-13, while making a combined $2.27 million in salary for days they were absent.
District officials indicated that they could not provide the amount of money paid to substitute teachers in 2012-13.
“(The policy) was something negotiated in the teacher’s agreement years ago,” Dean Rowley, a member of the Nebo school board, told EAGnews. “We’ve been trying to whittle it down each year.”
Nebo district spokeswoman Lana Hiskey said teachers may be asked to provide a doctor’s excuse if they are absent “in excess of 12 days and each 15 days after.” The school board also has the right to seek a second medical opinion regarding an employee medical condition that’s causing a great deal of absence, she said.
Hiskey noted that the 120-day plan also serves as the district’s short term disability policy. But she acknowledged that the policy is “excessive.”
The Murray City school district has a similar policy in its teacher union contract.
Teachers (and other qualified employees) with more than three years of experience receive up to 180 paid sick days over a two-year period.
That led the approximately 280 teachers in this small district (one high school, two middle schools, and seven elementarys) to take a combined 1,763 sick and personal days in 2012-13. Absent teachers collected a combined $496,343 in salary, while the district spent $143,420 on substitutes.
The Salt Lake City district has a contract provision giving teachers up to 72 hours per school year of sick leave and up to 16 hours of personal leave, all with full pay. Teachers can also take another eight hours of personal leave, as long as they cover the cost of a substitute teacher.
That comes to 96 hours of paid time away from the classroom, which is more than two weeks of work, based on a typical 40 hour work week. That’s on top of summer vacation and paid holidays teachers receive during the school year.
As a result of this policy, Salt Lake City’s 1,150 teachers (approximately) were paid a combined $3.7 million for sick and personal days in 2012-13. That forced the district to spend $1.3 million on substitute teacher costs.
Salt Lake district officials said the exact number of sick and personal days taken by teachers is not available. While that’s hard to believe in a large, metropolitan school district with modern record-keeping technology, we will take their word for it.
Logan City’s negotiated policy is also generous and expensive. Teachers are given 10 paid sick days and four paid personal days every school year. Those who accumulate 150 unused sick days qualify for 10 extra paid sick days per year.
As a result, the approximately 260 Logan City teachers took a combined 3,411 days off in 2012-13. The district also spent a whopping $482,276 on substitutes to cover absences for personal and sick leave (along with bereavement, school and district business, FMLA and absence without pay).
Finally there’s the Weber school district, which allows 10 paid sick days per year and another 10 sick days at 50 percent compensation. Sick leave is paid for illnesses to teachers, their spouses, children or parents, or anyone living in the household. So a teacher can receive full pay for an absence that’s due to the illness of their mother, father or some person they rent a room to, as far as we can tell.
The Weber district also allows 16 hours of personal leave.
The approximately 1,250 Weber teachers combined to take 12,202 sick and personal days in 2012-13 and were paid a cumulative $3.2 million for days they were absent. The district was forced to spend $707,746 on substitute teachers that year.
Part 6: Lazy, apathetic school boards allowing teacher unions to ignore verification rules
Part 7: Bizarre Utah contract provisions: Do they really have to put this stuff in writing?
Join the Discussion
Comments are currently closed.